The Voice of the People Is Politics

The National Historic Preservation Act, Executive Order 12898: Environmental Justice, and associated guidance are not structured to address historic African American settlement communities, in which data may not be available, infrastructure may no longer exist, and historic boundaries may be based in ancestral connections rather than land ownership. However, the Justice40Initiative heightened sensitivity, and agencies’ awareness of equity and public engagement is a cornerstone of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

Learn how public input built political will to develop datasets and analyze a transportation project's effects on historic African American settlement communities. Strategies including outreach, engagement, documenting oral histories, and archival research resulted in useable datasets for analyzing effects. Presenters discuss navigating agency expectations for analyzing effects on African American settlement communities, for which NEPA’s regulatory guidance was limited. Find out how the convergence of obtaining available data on historically under-documented settlement communities and navigating an effects analysis established future expectations across agencies for inclusion of historic African American settlement communities.

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